March 8-10 Google held their Google Next conference, where they shared news about Google Cloud, G Suite and more. My primary focus for the conference was G Suite (formerly known as Google Apps), Google's personal productivity and team collaboration platform. My colleagues Doug Henschen and Holger Mueller focused on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) side, and you can see their reviews here and here.
My Quick Take: After several years of working on architecture improvements for Drive and Hangouts, G Suite is doing several things right for their enterprise customers. However, given Google's past reputation for innovation, I'm disappointed that most of the announcements were catch-up to features/applications that other vendors are already doing in this space.
Below is a video in which I provide my full review and analysis of the G Suite news. I'm using the Acrossio video player, which allows you to jump back and forth to annotated moments of the video, as well as add your own annotations and comments. So if you're just interested in a specific section, find it in the conversation stream on the right side of the player, click and the video will start playing from there.
There were several announcements which you can read about here, including:
- Team Drives - Shared team folders
- Drive File Stream - files hosted in the cloud appear in Windows File Manager or Mac Finder as if they were local on your harddrive. (Early Adopter Program for G Suite Enterprise, Business and Education customers)
- Vault for Drive - Audit, compliance, governance. (DLP was announced earlier in Jan)
- Acquisition of AppBridge - for migrating content to G Suite
- Hangouts Meet - video / webconferecing
- Hangouts Chat - 1:1 and persistent group chat rooms. Available to G Suite Early Adopter customers.
- General Availability of Jamboard - white-boarding device and applications
- Gmail Add-ons - A new integration platform for Gmail that works across web and mobile devices (in Developer Preview)
Is your organization using G Suite? If so, what do you think of these announcements? If not, what are you using and how do you think it compares to G Suite?